Entries categorized under “Electronic Discovery”

If your company strategy toward Electronic Discovery (eDiscovery) process amounts to nothing more than a corporate fire drill, you are not alone; but the potential costs and risks associated with this reactive approach are staggering. An eDiscovery process can touch many areas within your company, and meeting the obligations of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) regarding eDiscovery processes can be a daunting task. According to the National Law Journal over 90 percent of business documents today are created and stored electronically. When you factor in the many avenues in which corporate data is created and stored, whether it is e-mail, spreadsheets, or electronic documents, the need for adopting a proactive eDiscovery process becomes apparent. (read more)

Accessing the history of any department within a branch of government can seem trying at times. For example, the technology used by the Office of the President required end users to decide which emails were necessary for long term preservation, as opposed to storing all of the data, regardless of personal interpretation. Therefore, accessing the unabridged version of the email records for the Republics highest office was hampered by user precision and recall, not technology. Where precision represents the number of correct hits in a return set of specified length; recall represents the number of correct returns relative to the total number of possible correct returns. Specifically, deciding which emails should and shouldn't be kept for long term retention is best left up to software and open records managers. (read more)

As corporate counsel becomes more savvy and comfortable with the 'reasonable' standards of due diligence, they have begun to take control of the spend. The first question that many a General Counsel asks is "Why don't we just do this ourselves?" Your vendors will have a polished set of answers sprinkled with names like Morgan Stanley, Qualcomm and Merrill Lynch, all designed to use the Sanction Scarecrow to keep their golden goose producing. The smoke and mirrors have lost their effectiveness in the face of new guidance from the Sedona Conference, EDRM, conference panels and waves of webinars. (read more)

This is delivered by marrying efficient resources, high-speed review applications and proactive project and process management. We also use higher level strategies, such as our Dynamic Data Analysis™ (a blending of statistical, conceptual and legal analysis), to both identify relevant documents as quickly and cost-effectively as possible, and to simultaneously reduce the total amount of data required to be reviewed. (read more)

The evolving nature of today's corporate legal landscape is creating sets of problems that companies never envisioned when they put data protection software in place years ago. Electronic data discoveries, ad hoc searches, legal holds and establishing chains of custody are now all part of today's corporate requirements that are pushing the capabilities of their existing data protection software to the limit. Those companies using CommVault Systems' Simpana® Software Suite are better positioned than most to address these needs. (read more)

The legal (but somewhat impractical) issue is pretty straightforward here---what industry you're in will determine the regulatory and legal requirements for you. Since relatively few industries are subjected to substantial regulatory/legal requirements for preservation, the question of retention of most records is, often, a balance between the benefit of end user access, aka knowledge management, contrasted against the burdens of data retention expense and potential legal production obligations. (read more)

The greatest challenge we experience is the requirement to educate IT and legal teams on the downstream impact of their technology decisions (e.g., an application may be a dream to manage for the IT team but could be very poor for review and production purposes). Our challenge is getting both teams to factor in functionality for all stakeholders and the impact of downstream costs, such as review, legal risk, analysis, etc., to their overall Return On Investment (ROI) calculations. (read more)

Individual memory and recognition generally suffers from two academic principals outlined in the seminar "Search and Information Retrieval", as well as an interview we did with Recomminds David Baskin. The first principal is "precision"; it defines ones ability to correctly identify content. The second is "recall"; it defines the capability to regularly identify new content within the same grouping as the first piece of content. Individuals often have difficulty identifying a proper category for content, and then subsequently pooling new content into the same category. Expecting users to remember emails from partners, customers and coworkers within a specific group for early case assessment will be a lesson in "missed expectations" and can be costly in terms of legal risk. (read more)

For example, a few years ago DiscoverReady had a conversation with a lawyer who needed high-level help understanding the basics of eDiscovery. Three months later, he was listed on his firm's website as the eDiscovery practice leader. DiscoverReady recommends legal counsel be aware of self-proclaimed experts and stay deeply involved in the eDiscovery process. (read more)

Unlike electronic data, physical case evidence exerted boundaries on the legal budget based on one's tolerance for going through the boxes of paper and other paper-based evidence. With today's electronically stored information (ESI), cost provisioning has become unpredictable. It has changed because a single, four-gigabyte thumb drive can have 240,000 document pages on it. Counsel doesn't really know how many of these documents will be relevant until the review cycle, unless there is an early case assessment done. (read more)

Getting to the center of a matter by way of custodian and concept searching will improve your legal risk management on a case-by-case basis. However, many mid-sized organizations continue to face challenges in terms of cost and complexity when they want to evaluate email. Estorian LookingGlass Spherical Indexing can manage and evaluate email at low cost, with reduced complexity delivering, making it a valuable solution for the mid-market. Mid-sized companies have much more email than they realize, often exceeding 1-2 terabytes in size. For example, 3000 users manage thirty-five 50 kilobyte messages a day over the course of 365 days will yield 1.35 terabytes of email. (read more)

For IT professionals who see no reason to treat evidence any differently than any other data, I practice a simple chain of custody exercise. I have them simply "move" files from on physical disk to another. Many people interpret data movement like they would move a chair; however, when you move Electronically Stored Information (ESI) from one physical device to another, it moves a representation of the original item. Critical things like data ownership, group security, created date and many other pieces of metadata (data about data) are changed when the data is "moved." This minor issue can become a major legal risk when authenticating chain of custody in court. (read more)

When these two groups meet, the language and focus is decidedly different. Fios consultants use skills of communication and collaboration to bridge this gap. This has been the focus of Fios since our inception nearly a decade ago. We pioneered the concept of litigation readiness in 2003, well before the amendments to the Federal Rules were in place, and have built an entire portfolio of discovery planning services to help both IT and legal prepare for discovery challenges. For example, in the data mapping process, we help them focus on e-discovery as a business process that incorporates: (read more)

As CEO I'm happy to say my sales, engineering and operations teams are executing against our shared vision. AXS-One latest functionality includes a very sought after Case Manager module. It is providing our customers with a true self-service discovery and review capability. If I may indulge a bit on my team's hard work; the Case Manager enables our customers to: * Conduct initial searches themselves * Review and modify the results of the searches * Add dispositions to the searched results * Package the search for additional review by outside counsel/other 3rd party (read more)

According to The Honorable Judge Peter Flynn of the Circuit Court of Cook County, Chancery Division, Illinois, Meet-and-confer meeting's are supposed to be about putting your IT cards on the table, what one can and cannot do with respect to data, data types, collections, preservations, data transformations, etc. Judge Flynn responded to a question related to guarded sharing of IT capability during meet-and-confer meetings during last weeks live Panel Discussion on Document Review Acceleration, hosted by Epiq Systems. He responded saying it was "Flat dead wrong, sanctionable." According to Judge Flynn, guarding IT and ECA information during meet-and-confers is probably illegal. His response and the participant question make it clear that 'the guarding of information is a competitive advantage in the world of legal wrangling.' (read more)

Joshua Konkle: One of the most frequently asked questions by CIO's and others worried about the cost of data management is "how long do I have to keep my data, really?" What do you say when you get asked that question? -- Bill Lyons: We can help is the first thing I say. We have been providing record compliance solutions for many years. In all cases, we discuss the need to plan for secure destruction and work with customers on implementing appropriate technology to manage the retention, disposition, preservation and destruction of data. (read more)

Carl Frappaolo, AIIM Vice President, Market Intelligence says "Unstructured information drives numerous business processes..." The logical option here would be to deploy a business process management suite (BPMS) of tools. Step one is to identify what departments, project groups and individuals are involved in the business processes. Step two; identify the information that results from those individuals, groups and departments. Step three, once the business process is mapped to the information you simply associate it with a retention management product and policies. (read more)

Prior to 2007 the drivers for archiving were two fold 1) operational efficiencies and 2) SEC 17a4. The latter required financial services companies to maintain a record of every email sent and received from the company. These two issues drove the systems to retain and manage data, largely email initial. The early success of products from KVS, Inc, now Symantec, are clear examples of people buying for specific applications. (read more)

I would agree with that 70% of the time reviews require more data from the source, in fact, it is probably higher. The reason the source data needs to be recalled during review is based on a simple fact - "the review phase is the FIRST time a qualified reviewer has looked at the data qualitatively, i.e. custodians, concepts, context etc." Waiting until the data is in a review system to evaluate it is causing companies thousands if not millions annually. Those dollars would be much better spent as pennies, which is the cost of ECA tools in terms of review budgets. The goal's are simple 1) reduce data sets going into review 2) improve data review during collection. (read more)

Today marks the end of an era.  The era would be email archiving and eDiscovery 1.0.  I say this because Eliot Spitzer was the beginning of an era that ushered in the broad use and acceptance of email archiving software... (read more)

Since full-text search can only find words or associate concepts with image files, users still need to review the images. The ability to review images as it relates to emails has been overlooked in the major systems, such as Autonomy/Zantaz, Symantec Enterprise Vault, etc. The scenario is simple: your human resources or legal group has a need to do an early case assessment, but some of the critical email data-points are pictures attached to the messages. In most cases, the pictures have obtuse names like DSC30012.JPG or IMG_1459.PNG, telling you absolutely nothing about the file. What you need is a thumbnail view of all images related to your search query. (read more)

Joshua Konkle: In companies with multiple litigations and complex IT the argument is often made for soup-to-nuts approach, preservation to production what are your thoughts on such a system? --- Greg Buckles: First let me say that information management is one of the most important pieces of the eDiscovery reference model. Second, the soup-to-nuts approach may lack flexibility by design and could create inefficiency depending on the scale of a matter. For example, a system that works for a small HR case, may not work for a shareholder lawsuit. (read more)

Although the data elements are small, they are numerous. For example, a medium sized company with 3000 users using a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) system would generate 24000 calls if each person received one call per hour throughout an 8 hour work day. In two years time that would equal at least 18 million call records and requires companies implement automated solutions to capture and manage these call records. Moreover, those automated systems must scale well beyond 18 million records on a daily basis. Working with carrier grade companies, those that serve the general public, Suntech experienced very high data retention requirements early in the development cycle. (read more)

We often ask our clients to bring IT and Legal together for a conversation. We use our experienced staff to help coordinate between the two groups on legal issues, retention policies and key technology concerns. For example, we don't expect GCs to understand storage area networks (SAN) and host bus adapters (HBA), but we do want them to know that the equivalent to a post-it note on a contract is meta-data properties like blind-carbon copy on emails. We also encourage our clients and prospects to educate themselves using white papers, publications and blogs. (read more)

Focus, we say let's focus on your industry and what we know can be destroyed. Each client carries different requirements and regulations. For example, the Financial Services industry is regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The SEC establishes rules for all financial services companies' business and communication process. In 2000 they required all financial services companies to retain communications between broker-dealers under the 17a-4 for a period of seven (7) years. (read more)